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'Queer music' conference at Case looks at cultural impact of the medium

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Madonna, like many divas before her, has been embraced by the LGBT community. But why? That's part of the discussion of a conference at Harkness Chapel at Case Western Reserve University on Saturday, Nov. 16. The symposium is called "Music Department Colloquia: Queer Popular Music â A Conference.''
(AP file)

PREVIEW

Music Department Colloquia: Queer Popular Music – A ConferenceWhen: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 16.Where: Case Western Reserve University’s Harkness Chapel, 11200 Bellflower Road.Participants: Mitchell Morris, Valentine Professor of Music, Amherst College; Alice Echols, Barbra Streisand Professor of Contemporary Gender Studies and English, University of Southern California; Stephen Pennington, assistant professor of music, Tufts University; Judith Peraino, professor of musicology and a member of the Medieval Studies Program and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Cornell University; and Susan McClary, professor of musicology at CWRU.Noteworthy: Free and open to the public.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Music is so much more than words set to a collection of sounds in varying pitches and tempos.

Music is that place where you can find refuge from your hurts, revel in your joys and learn how to express your own loves or hates. It can speak out against social injustice, rally the troops, soothe a troubled mind or simply get your feet moving.

For some, music is how we define ourselves to the world. I’m country; she’s Goth. He’s hip-hop; that cat’s jazz. That dude’s a rocker; the chick over there is electronica.

But really, genre is irrelevant. Music at its root is what gives us context.

View full sizeMitchell Morris, a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, is one of the featured panelists in a Case Western Reserve University conference on what's termed "queer music.'' Morris is holding a copy of his book, "The Persistence of Sentiment.''Courtesy of Mitchell Morris

Mitchell Morris is one of several nationally known scholars who will be presenting at the conference at the school that last year was voted one of the 25 friendliest in the country to the LGBT community. Morris, the Valentine Professor of Music at Massachusetts’ Amherst College has come up with a definition of “queer music”:

It’s music “created by, performed by or enthusiastically embraced by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals or transgendered folks in all their magnificent diversity and also by their allies, friends and partners on the margins of conventional sexual identity.”

Spoken like a true academic, with lots of glowing words and such. But what is the true appeal of queer music?

“You can’t give one single answer, for a couple of reasons,” said Morris, reached by phone in his university office. One reason is that as social conditions change, music changes.

“One of the reasons it’s defined that way is because it’s not always in the music, it’s in what the audience does with the music,” Morris said.

View full sizeJudy Garland's repeated bouts with adversity have made her a sweetheart in the LGBT community.AP file

“Listening is a complicated process,” he said. “You understand in a lot of different ways, which is why someone like Judy Garland, who wasn’t known for lesbian affairs, can fit in very well with this.”

But the fact of the matter is that queer music -- the adjective that still makes some uncomfortable because of its past use as a derogative but increasingly is being embraced as an inclusive term – is best known for its divas.

One thinks of Bette Midler, who began her career singing in gay bathhouses; Cher, who transformed the camp of “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves” into enduring superstardom; Madonna, who borrowed the title of her mega-hit “Vogue” from gay African-American culture; or Lady Gaga, whose “Born That Way” speaks directly to LGBT youth.

“One question is to define what a diva is,” said Morris. “Nowadays, VH1’s idea of a diva is a woman with a strong voice who makes a lot of money. But classic divas are women who overcame adversity at one point or another, and they do it over and over.”

He cited Garland as an example.

“For Judy Garland, lots of things were ‘wrong’ with her,” he said. “She was fat and ugly, and uppers and downers were forced on her. There was always something wrong with her and something odd about her, starting with this 6-year-old with a weirdly mature voice.

“What matters was not as much her skill as the way she used it to fight against things and people who would keep her down,” he said.

Morris is a professor, and as such, likes to put things in historical perspective. That’s partly what this conference, organized by Robert Walser, director of CWRU’s Center for Popular Music Studies, will do.

Morris noted that prior to the Depression and the Hays Code, which set a strict censorship code the film industry, things were a bit looser, to say the least.

“Think about the Hays Code,’’ he said. “Once that was installed in Hollywood in 1933, the careers of people like Mae West were ruined. She modeled much of her style on close friends who were female impersonators.”

So the tolerance – relatively speaking, anyway – of pre-Depression music and the arts “went into hiding,” Morris said, and that lasted even into the 1990s. And because of that, what he termed “metaphors and double entendres became prevalent. Hence the use of the word ‘queer.’ ”

“I myself don’t like the term very much,” said Morris, who is gay. “It seems to me in this world, it’s so complicated that every time you try to have one term to cover everything, it doesn’t work out very well.”

Terminology aside, what he called an “unwritten rule between the ’30s and ’80s that was a kind of don’t-ask, don’t-tell” had an effect that extends even into the present. Some of his current students don’t even realize that the Village People song “Macho Man” is rife with gay themes.

Morris and Liz Roccoforte, who heads CWRU’s LGBT Center, which opened in 2010, said that very fact that the school is having this conference is evidence of a growing acceptance of what used to be called “alternative lifestyles.”

“We’re moving ahead AND backwards,” said Morris. “From my point of view, as a kid in the late ’60s and ’70s, it’s inconceivable how much better things have gotten for LGBT folks in general. The simple fact of gay-marriage laws! Well, if you’d asked me in the ’80s, I’d have said it’s never going to happen.”

So what could possibly be a down side?

“One line of thought,” he said, “says that all this liberation has been good but spells the death of gay culture. That’s a good and bad thing, because it means a lot of people will suffer less. But it’s a bad thing inasmuch as, as it gets more diffuse, it’s harder to sustain a common culture.’’

That’s compounded by the hit gay culture took in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early ’90s, he said.

“For a lot of the LGBT culture, there was a huge loss in the 1980s because so many men died,” Morris said. “The vast realm of deaths from AIDS made of lot of things that were culturally important disappear, because nobody was there to transmit them.”

That’s one reason why he focuses so heavily on the historical aspects of LGBT culture. Going back to the early or mid-20th century makes it easier to understand today’s artists, such as Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Maybe not consciously, but they are paying homage to those who came before them, just as Marilyn Monroe was honoring ’20s singer Helen Kane and Betty Boop when she sang “I Wanna Be Loved by You.’’

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